Some Initial Guidelines for Building Reusable Quantum Oracles

The evolution of quantum hardware is highlighting the need for advances in quantum software engineering that help developers create quantum software with good quality attributes. Specifically, reusability has been traditionally considered an important quality attribute. Increasing the reusability of quantum software will help developers create more complex solutions. This work focuses on the reusability of oracles, a well-known pattern of quantum algorithms that can be used to perform functions used as input by other algorithms. In this work, we present several guidelines for making reusable quantum oracles. These guidelines include three different levels for oracle reuse: the reasoning behind the oracle algorithm, the function which creates the oracle, and the oracle itself. To demonstrate these guidelines, two different implementations of a range of integers oracle have been built by reusing simpler oracles. The quality of these implementations is evaluated in terms of functionality and quantum circuit depth. Then, we provide an example of documentation following the proposed guidelines for both implementations to foster reuse of the provided oracles. This work aims to be a first point of discussion towards quantum software reusability.